Gearbox Talks Borderlands 2 DLC - Mechromancer

Randy Pitchford is making a PC. He’s not merely buying bits of kit and assembling them. He’s actually having each part manufactured according to his own specs. On the coffee table in his office, there’s a morass of cooling pipes, cables, cards and boards.

It’s easy to understand why the Gearbox co-founder really digs Borderlands 2’s first DLC character, Mechromancer, first revealed at Pax East in April. She’s a gadget fanatic, a maker of things, pulling together the usual lawless-land detritus to fashion useful stuff, like a killer robot called Death Trap (D374-TP).

Clearing the computer gear out of our way, Pitchford explains, “The idea behind her is that she's really good with technology and good with equipment and machinery and stuff.”

Lugging the box and the cables to a spare corner of his office, he adds, “She's built this horrific giant robot that's called Death Trap. She can digistruct it into existence wherever she is, and send it to do stuff. Death Trap's kind of like this crazy pet for this little girl that's survived out in the wasteland.”

The magic of Borderlands is its replayability, and Gearbox’s DLC plan is designed to appeal to those gamers who want to play through with more than one character class, or who like to experiment in co-op mode.

Mechromancer is in good company. The basic game ships with four classes offering unique abilities that can be honed through skill trees. Gunzerker wields two weapons at once; Assassin has sneaky stealth options; Commando has access to a droppable gun-turret; Siren can suspend enemies in mid-air, phase-locking groups of bad-guys during combat.

Mechromancer’s strategic challenge is figuring out how best to use that robot-sidekick.

Pitchford says, “We can imagine Death Trap as more of a tank kind of thing, where it's going to get the attention of the enemies and draw them to itself so that she can pick them off, or other co-op players can pick them off.”

He adds, “We also imagine that there could be a utility version of Death Trap where it's helping you out or helping out the other players. Maybe running around supplying them with ammo. There's a very offensive application we can imagine, where it's just rushing out there and beating the sh*t out of things. That's really awesome to watch, and really powerful.”

Gearbox has only just turned its attention fully on designing Mechromancer’s abilities. Pitchford stresses that “this is all speculative. We have to fully design and build the thing”. He explains, “Right now there's some animation going, and there's some design happening. It'll be cool to see how it comes together. I know Jonathan Hemingway, who designed all the skill trees for all the characters is just all in on it. He loves it and he's able to spend his full mindshare developing it now.”

Borderlands 2's DLC isn’t about add-on missions. It’s about incorporating a new class into the chaos of Pandora. Pitchford says, “It's not like some games, where you create a couple of chapters where I can play as this character. We're making a character class so it works for the whole game. You can go and play the entire game as this character, and you can play with any of the other characters in co-op. It has to be balanced. There's a lot of design complexity to do that. But we really wanted to try it, we wanted to push ourselves, because if we can figure that out, we think that's awesome.”

This points towards the whole DLC plan. “We'll probably want to be adding more characters,” he says. “With Borderlands 1, we did four DLCs, and they killed. We had a lot of fun making them. Right now, we have a lot of momentum. There's still a lot of energy and love from a development and talent point of view. There's a lot of folks who want to do stuff and have ideas about things we can do, having finished the game.

“We created hooks in the game that allow us to add characters as patches, as DLC. There's no technical reason why we couldn't do more.”

Borderlands 2 is very often compared with Diablo. Both share a fanatical attention to leveling up, combining weapons and attacks to squeeze the most mayhem out of different character classes. It’s interesting that, as Borderlands 2’s main development effort draws to a close, the game that Pitchford is playing is Diablo III.

“I’m playing as a Mage but I’m definitely going to also play as a Barbarian so I can chop dudes up with melee weapons instead of casting fireballs. That changes the whole nature of the experience. There’s a lot of people that play Borderlands like that, as a hobby. Adding characters is more for those kinds of gamers.

“Of the four main characters, one of them is a female and some people like to play as female. By adding another one there’s extra choice. That might be the most interesting option for people playing in co-op and we know from Borderlands 1 that, depending on which platform, as many as half the people are playing in co-op, either split-screen or online.”

Borderlands 2 launches in the U.S on September 18 (UK, September 21). Pitchford says he is confident that Mechromancer will be ready within 60 to 90 days after the game's release, as promised at PAX East. The character is available as a free download to members of the Borderlands 2 Premiere Club, which can be accessed by pre-ordering Borderlands 2 from a participating retailer.

Colin Campbell is a British-born, Santa-Cruz based games journalist, working for IGN. You can contact me via Twitter or IGN.